This invention relates to dynamic application migration in a shared pool of configurable computing resources. More specifically, the invention relates to retrieval of a consistent dataset to support the application migration.
Cloud computing is a model of service delivery for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computer resources, e.g. networks, network bandwidth, servers, processing, memory, storage, applications, virtual machines, and services, that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or interaction with a provider of service. One of the characteristics of cloud computing infrastructure is that applications can be launched from a plurality of locations. Several factors drive the decision to launch an application in a specific data center, including resource availability, user location, disaster awareness, data location, and available facilities. However, the prior art cloud computing configurations do not provide flexibility of separation of the location of the data from the application location.
On another level, it is known that the current cloud computing models are not flexible with respect to disaster recovery. More specifically, it is known in the art that a failed application must recover in a designated recovery center. For example, the current models do not enable recovery based upon the factors listed above. At the same time, because current models require the entire data volume to be located local to the recovery site, the entire data set that supports the failed application must be copied to the recovery site in total before the failed application can be executed.